Despite many advanced physical and link layer techniques (e.g. adaptive modulation and coding, HARQ, power control etc.) that are employed in today's wireless networks, a large number of mobile users, especially at the cell edges, receive intolerably low data rates due to high interference and path loss. Moreover, there is a growing demand for increasingly higher data rates in multimedia wireless networks. As a result, effective interference mitigation techniques are necessary to provide adequate quality of service in future wireless networks.
Fourth generation wireless systems (e.g. Long Term Evolution (LTE), WiMAX, and Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB)) employ e.g., Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA), which provides intra-cell interference avoidance by scheduling in-cell users on different time-frequency resources (e.g., tones). On the other hand, inter-cell interference from neighboring base transmissions continues to pose a significant problem.